Jodie Whittaker on her other doctor character in Trust Me – BBC News

Before she takes over the lead role in Doctor Who, Jodie Whittaker will be appearing on our screens as a very different doctor … and a phony one at that.

In BBC One thriller Trust Me, Whittaker plays Cath Hardacre, a harbour who fails her profession after she diverts whistle-blower.

Wanting to provide a high quality of life for her young daughter, she steals her best friend’s identity as a elderly doctor and lands a position in an Edinburgh hospital( a colleague amusingly describes the A& E district as “like Braveheart with bad-tempered pensioners” .)

Armed with her wet-nurse insight and some medical textbooks, Cath sets out to bluff her space as an experienced disaster medic.

Of course, it doesn’t all depart smoothly. Trust Me contains several squirm-inducing situations of medical terms and conditions that don’t go by the book

An early meeting insures her arrange a man’s ruined paw having forgotten to give him an anaesthetic. Suppose the screams.

Then there’s a heart-stopping – and heart-breaking – sequence involving the victims of a car crash.

“There was blood squirting everywhere, ” says Whittaker, at a press screening that was held before the most recent notice she was to oust Peter Capaldi in Doctor Who.

Like her attribute in Trust Me, the blood would certainly be phony, but that doesn’t make it any less excruciating to watch.

“The prosthetics were amazing, ” Whittaker contributes. “And there were prodigious performers coming in and committing to the voice of pain.”

‘It’s not that hard to fake it’

Trust Me was written by Dan Sefton, a real-life A& E physician, whose other TV writing includes Good Karma Hospital and Mr Selfridge.

“I think there are loads of people who aren’t real doctors, ” says Sefton, moderately chillingly.

“It’s not that hard to fake it if you have some suitabilities. Division of this thing is that people don’t ask too many questions. We mount this intentionally in a region that was on the boundary and struggling to recruit.”

Sefton likewise reveals that there had once been a event of a false physician working in his own hospital.

“He only got found out through certain administrative happening, because he was actually pretty competent, ” he recalls.

“Often these physicians are very professional and get on with very well with their colleagues. The only mistake is that they aren’t real doctors.”

As well as writing the tense infirmary panoramas, Sefton likewise facilitated give the actors some medical training.

That included teaching Whittaker how to put a needle into his own arm.

“I got it in your vein first time, ” the Broadchurch actress documents proudly. “But I forgot to introduced the detonator on and you started bleeding, which was a bit of a anxiety! “

Whittaker says she was fine with the “physical and emotional stuff” that the script challenged. “The act I contended most with – and that comes from failing over half my GCSEs – was the inflection of medicines.”

The rest of the shoot includes Emun Elliott as an A& E physician, Sharon Small as the expert consultants in charge, and Inbetweeners star Blake Harrison as Cath’s ex-boyfriend and papa of their daughter.

Whittaker describes herself as big-hearted fan of the NHS. “You don’t have to be rich to be poorly, ” she says. “There are obviously questions – we all speak the word – but I feel that the thing you want to celebrate is the day-to-day people: The doctors and nurses.”

Sefton is acknowledged that what mesmerizes him is WHY beings pretend to be doctors.

“Men almost always do it for egocentric reasonableness, ” he says. “They are often fantasists. They want to be somebody who is impressive.

“Women tend to do it more much more practical, interesting rationales. That’s one of the reasons why I chose a female supporter for this drama.

“I was much more interested in looking at how the act of lying changes someone who is an essentially honest person.”